A Perfect Tapestry Rewoven: Travis Bring ‘The Man Who’ Back to Australia

For the first time since their sellout 2001 Australian tour, multi-platinum and BRIT award winning, Scottish alternative rock band Travis is coming to Australia, to perform classic album The Man Who in full and other fan favourites from throughout their storied career. The Man Who was a stellar success in Australia, reaching platinum status and selling in excess of 110,000 copies. The Man Who  spent nine weeks at number one on the UK Albums Chart and was certified nine times platinum, representing sales of nearly three million in the UK alone.  Dougie Payne (bass, backing vocals) spoke to Hi Fi Way about this classic album and returning to Australia this January coming.

Talking to bass player Dougie Payne from Travis, how you going?
I’m great, thanks Rob. It’s actually sunny in Glasgow. I can’t believe it. This is unheard of. How you doing?

Yeah, even better now that Travis is coming to Australia. I just about fell out of the chair the other day when I saw this announcement because I thought it would be something never in a million years that would happen, and let alone Adelaide as well.
Oh, great man. Yeah, it’s been far too long. We are embarrassed at how long it’s been, to be honest, but it’s what, nearly twenty three years, something like that. I mean, that’s ridiculous. That is embarrassing. I still don’t really understand why it’s been so long, because with the two tours that we did of Australia, they were amazing and we had amazing shows. We had such a great time. But I think that maybe we were at quite a big management company and they had a lot of acts and I think it was just logistics got in the way and we, they thought it was just too difficult to do something again. Then time moves on. There’s gaps between albums and then things happen, but we now have taken back control of the band as it were, in terms of management, it’s no coincidence I think that we did that a couple of years ago and now we’re coming back to Australia. So we are thrilled and delighted.

There’s so much that’s happened in that time, you know, families, new albums, COVID, you know, there’s been a lot going on in twenty odd years.
A: Yeah, exactly. Life kind of runs away with itself sometimes, like you say, families, kids, school and you’ve got albums too, all that stuff. I’ve kind of forgotten about COVID. It’s like, geez, that, of course there was that as well.

That’s probably wiped out a good three years for a lot of people?
I think because of that we should all be allowed to take three years off our age!

Oh, I’m not complaining about that idea, that would bring me on the right side of fifty for a change. This tour is about The Man Who and playing this album in full. What do you think it is about the album that still keeps resonating with fans?
Um, it’s funny. It’s just one of those records that just has a little magic to it. I was thinking about this the other day, thinking about playing the record in full because we did that a good few years ago. We did it as a kind of anniversary show. It was amazing to play the record live because you never listen to your own albums. Well, I don’t, anyway. I never listen to our own stuff unless I’ve got to learn something or relearn something that I’ve forgotten. Playing the record, we did it for a few nights, was almost like an out of body experience because I was taken back to making the record. I was back in the studio with Nigel. I was back in Mayfair Studios in London and back in Abbey Road mastering it. It’s one of those records that has more like atmospheres.

Nigel told us afterwards that when he was making that record, he was trying to make his Hunky Dory, right. He’d just come off the back of OK Computer. That was the big rock record, that was the Dark Side of the Moon. He was trying to make his Hunky Dory and I think that’s quite a good comparison. I’m not comparing the two records in terms of quality or anything like that, but in terms of the fact that they’re albums, the way the songs feel like atmospheres more than just songs, they take you into a place and they’re quite varied, but they hang together as a cohesive whole. Even tough they’re quite different, they’ve got Writing to Reach You, The Fear, Driftwood, Turn and all of these songs that are quite disparate, but they seem to exist within the same atmosphere, within the same universe. I think that makes it quite a seductive record in terms of a listening experience. It’s got a little magic and a lot of that is to do with Nigel. Nigel created the sonic world for the songs to live in.

Good Feeling was our first album, and it was quite a guitary rocky, you know, tail end of Brit Poppy kind of record. There was a lot of those kind of records around it in 1997. We thought we were going to do part two. We were writing a lot of guitar heavy songs and rock songs that ended up being B-sides, but it wasn’t like we consciously changed direction. It was like those things just fell away as Nigel created the world the songs were living in. So songs like Driftwood, they arrived quite late, because we’d gone through the process of making these other songs and then it was like the record, it felt, honestly, it sounds strange, but it felt like with Nigel at the helm, like it made itself.

That album is definitely one to be taken in as a complete experience playing it start to end. It seems to be an album that needs to be listened to that way?
I kind of agree. I remember we were in the studio and we’d done the backing track and some overdubs for Driftwood. We were excited and we were chatting away in the background while Nigel was at the desk and he went, “Could you just go away?” We were like, “What?” He’s like, “Just give me half an hour. Give me half an hour. Just go to the pub.” We were like, “Okay, all right.” So we walked out and then I’d forgotten my wallet or something. I walked back into the studio, I walked back into the control room and Nigel was like, as I remember it, an octopus. He was all over the console, the mixing console and he was plugging things in, twisting things. I just picked up my wallet and I went, “What are you doing Nige?” And he went, “I’m just making it amazing.” That was what he did. He made everything amazing. I think that his fingerprints are all over that feeling of it being a cohesive thing, you know, a cohesive piece of work, which makes it very gratifying. It’s a lovely thing to play it as a whole because we’ve done it a little bit, but this’ll be nice.

It must be so humbling, the legacy that album has created and continues to reach younger fans who discover it for the first time?
It’s funny because we’ve just been finishing up the touring for our tenth album, which came out last year in LA Times. Obviously we play the new stuff, but we try and play a representation of everything. There’s a lot of songs now, ten albums, it means you’ve got a lot of songs to pick from to make a twenty five song set. We’ve just done a bunch of festivals and it’s kids who weren’t born, and now it is the parents bringing their kids who are teenagers or whatever, and they’re like, oh yeah, we grew up listening to this. They’re bouncing around doing the pogo to Why Does It Always Rain on Me? Music’s like real magic. It exists outside the time and it exists outside of everything. It’s like a time machine, a diary and a photo album and it just transcends everything.

When you do like a tour like this playing an album start to end, is there anything about the album that you’ve rediscovered that wasn’t necessarily apparent when the album actually came out?
Certainly there’s certain songs that we had never played live. Well, certainly not in front of an audience. We did a rocky version of a song called The Fear for a little while, but we never actually played The Fear as it is on the record. I’d kind of forgotten how amazing that piece of music is. It’s so hypnotic and it’s that atmospheric thing. It’s kind of magnetic and so there’s funny moments where you get a little lost in this feeling and your fingers are just doing this thing automatically… you’re just in another world. I kind of wonder if that’s what the record is like to people when they first listen to it, if it kind of takes you into another place.

Are there any songs that really sort of challenge you even now, that probably take a lot of practice to nail?
Last Laugh of the Laughter probably is because there’s a lot of choral backing vocals in that you’ve got to nail. Then it goes into that, what do you call it, that Adam Clayton kind of U2 bass line. So, I’ve got to do a little bit of homework for that one. mm-hmm.

The second part of the set is all the fan favorites. That must be a bit of a tough one to work out because there’s so many good songs in there to pick from as well?
I think it might be a good idea to do like an online request thing because it is very hard to know what to play actually. Every time you make a new record, you play around with the set until it feels like, oh yeah, that’s it. The set is good when it runs smooth and it doesn’t feel like there’s any bumps and it’s almost over before you know it. But then doing The Man Who, there’s a few mainstays in the set Turn, Why Does It Always Rain On Me?, Writing to Reach You, Driftwood, quite a lot of the big hitters that are in the set, they’ll be done. So we have to get a bit creative with the second half and obviously you want to know what people want to hear, so I think we might take some requests.

Will there be much from the relatively new album LA Times?
I think so. We’ll obviously just have to work it out once we get together because we’re doing a couple of days rehearsal in Japan before we come to Australia. So we’ll work it out then. But I reckon it’d be nice to do at least a couple of the newer ones because they’ve made friends with the old stuff very well. They work well together. Hopefully we’ll do a bit of everything.

How was it working with Chris Martin and Brandon Flowers on Raze The Bar? That must have been a pretty cool experience.
Well, we’ve known those guys for a long time and when we finished, or thought we’d finished the song, we were like, yeah, this is great. And then Fran was like, but it’s kind of like a convivial song, you know, it’s a literal arms-around-your-mates-in-the-pub kind of song. He said it’d be just great to have different voices than ours. I was like, yeah. And he said, and recognisable voices. So he was like, right, I’m going to make some calls. Then Chris got involved because Fran and him are neighbors in LA, they live near each other. We were having trouble getting the running order right for for the album. So Fran gave Chris a call and said, could you help us out with the running order? And they were listening to the songs in the car. Chris said, oh yeah, but he couldn’t stop listening to Raze the Bar. He ended up not doing the running order, he just kept listening to Raze the Bar. They ended up back at his house and he started playing the piano and singing it. Fran was like, right, you got to sing this, at least sing along in the chorus. So he did that. Then Brandon just did it and was like, yeah, no problem, because he’s an old friend. I think he ended up singing it in his bathroom and then just sent the files and put it all together. It was so nice to hear those voices on the record. We ended up touring with The Killers about a year and a half ago, we did The Killers UK tour, which was fantastic. That was just as the record came out, so it was all meant to be.

Are you blown away by the fan response to that album in particular?
It’s been really lovely because the album before, which was called 10 Songs, confusingly, the ninth album!We finished that record a week before lock down. So we didn’t really know what to do with it. We sat on it for six months and then it was like, we’re just going to have to put this out. So we put out a record and for the first time ever we didn’t tour it. We never got a chance to tour that album or play any of those songs live. So touring this record, the LA Times record, it was like a complete relief. It was this release of a long time of not getting to play live and not getting to play new stuff live. That’s very important for bands. I think it’s very energising, invigorating and rejuvenating, all those words, to play new stuff. It’s really important to keep making new things, to keep bringing new stuff into the set and into the world.

Is it too early to start thinking what might be the next album? Are you playing around with anything in particular?
We’ve actually had a little tryout in the studio, not of new stuff of our own, but we did a recording session a couple of weeks ago in Nigel Godrich’s new studio. He’s got a new studio down in London. So we went to see what the studio was like and try it out. It was great. It was just great to be back in the studio. We did a handful of cover versions and it was so much fun. It kind of made everyone again go, right, yeah, it might be time to start thinking about what’s next. So we’ll go back in time and revisit The Man Who, and we’ll be delighted to be in Australia, and then in the new year we’ll think about what’s next.

Is there anything uniquely Australian that you’re looking forward to doing when you’re here?
I had one of the best days off in my entire touring experience in Sydney. I had an amazing time in Sydney. I want to do that walking over the bridge thing. I’m really hoping we’ve got time while we’re there to do that. It looks terrifying, but I want to. I also really want to take Andy up there because he’s terrified of heights.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Travis on the following dates, tickets from Live Nation…